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SERE GRAPES: Though ultraripe wines
have been fashionable in the Napa
Valley for more than a decade, climate
change appears to be forcing the issue. While recent summers were
cool, most Napa winemakers agree that 10-year averages are the hottest in memory.
Too often, a result has been overripe grapes, and the cooked flavors and throat-searing
alcohol that accompany them. If temperatures continue to rise even slightly,
Napa could be in trouble. Most superior grape-growing regions enjoy cool summer
nights, which allow vines to recover from the stress of the day’s heat.
Lose that, and you’re left with grapes better suited for bulk wines. “If
average nighttime temperatures increase even a few degrees,” says Andrew
Walker, a professor in the department of Viticulture and Enology at the University
of California at Davis, “then there’s really no difference between
Napa and the Central Valley.’ Tony Truchard, whose Truchard Vineyards
is located in Carneros, Napa’s coolest pocket, says: “If I could
start the California
wine industry over again, I wouldn’t plant on the valley floor at all.
It’s too hot, and it’s going to get hotter.” But those mature
vineyards are considered Napa’s most prestigious. And Napa retains other
desirable attributes. “In Napa, we’ve got rootstocks we like, soils
we think are the best,” Pat Garvey, an owner of Flora Springs Winery and
Vineyards, says. “We’re not going anywhere.” Instead, Garvey
and others have set out to mitigate the heat’s effect. The mandate is
clear: undo everything that was done in the name of ripeness during the 1990s.
Those cabernet clones imported from Bordeaux because they ripen so easily? Rip
them out and plant something more reluctant. Vines positioned near the ground
to soak up radiant heat? Install a trellis system and pull them higher. Wineries
have started planting vineyards on a northeast-southwest axis, which minimizes
strong afternoon sunlight. They add cover crops — clover, bell bean —
to compete with the vines and prolong the fruit’s maturation process.
And they’re removing fewer leaves. “We used to try for as much sun
as possible, but we’ve backed off,” says Doug Shafer of Shafer Vineyards.
“Shading has become really important. Without it, we get roasted fruit.”
Trying to reduce alcohol in the winery is like trying to bring a snapshot into
focus in the darkroom, but it can be done. Perhaps the most widespread technique,
though one rarely acknowledged, is dilution. “You use what we call ‘Jesus
Units,’ because they turn water into wine,” says the owner of a
Napa Winery known for its elegant cabernets. Manual sorters, previously employed
to detect rot, now look for overripe grapes. “It’s a large investment
in labor, but it makes a significant difference,” Michelle Edwards, the
winemaker at Cliff Lede Vineyards, says. “Last harvest on some properties,
I removed as much as 10 percent of the grapes off the table because they were
desiccated. ” These changes cost money, but they’re less costly
than allowing wines to carry such alcoholic heat that nobody wants to drink
them, and less drastic than abandoning Napa cabernet altogether. Still, the
future might include grape varieties that do better in hot weather, like Grenache
and Syrah. “If it keeps getting warmer, maybe we have to think about that,”
Shafer says. “Maybe cabernet won’t always be king here. I have a
hard time saying that, but it could be the answer.’ BRUCE SCHOENFELD

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CARBON COOKOUT?: Barbecuing, as any guy grilling a flank steak will
tell you, is as much about process as product. Propane
gas versus charcoal is typically a debate about flavor, not carbon-dioxide emissions.
But let’s ask anyway. Which is greener? Probably charcoal, according to
Tris West, an environmental scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, who
last year calculated emissions from the two methods. He says that since charcoal
is derived from wood — and thus trees that took in atmospheric carbon as
they grew — burning it on the grill is pretty close to a “net zero”
in terms of carbon emissions. Propane, by comparison, is a fossil fuel that
adds to greenhouse-gas accumulations. West cautions, though, that it gets a
little more complicated than that. Even if burning charcoal is technically greener,
it may release particulates into the atmosphere. (Food scientists also warn
that it can be less healthful.) It’s good to know that your choice won’t
effect any significant change in mass carbon emissions. By West’s estimation,
the total amount of carbon dioxide released from barbecue grills on July 4 is
on the order of .003 percent of the annual U.S. total. JON
GERTNER

Photo

Sere GrapesCredit
Robert Glusic/Getty Images

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BETTER LIVING WITH LIVESTOCK: Like that of most dairy farmers, Abe Collins’s
financial well-being is linked to the quantity and quality of the milk his cows
produce. But, he’ll tell you, milk is not the most valuable product that
comes from the 130 acres of Vermont
grassland he farms. Collins is a leading figure in a nascent movement known
as carbon farming, which operates partly on the principle that proper livestock
management leads to the rapid development of topsoil and increased plant growth.
If Collins has his way, his milk money could be dwarfed by income based on the
ability of his pastures to mitigate climate change. Collins practices a grazing
methodology known as mob stocking, which involves rotating livestock through
small paddocks that are not regrazed until the forage has returned to knee-height.
While some farmers turn their cows out in the spring and might move them a few
times over the summer, Collins moves his 80 dairy cows as many as eight times
each day. The payoff for his labors? The high concentration of manure serves
as fertilizer, while complete plant regrowth allows for creation of the healthy
root clusters needed to build soil. And drought-prone regions benefit from the
clustered hoof prints, which capture what meager moisture falls from the sky.
Charles Rice, a soil microbiologist at Kansas
State University, says the potential is vast. “With proper land
management, we could sequester an additional 160 million metric tons of carbon
annually.” That’s about 10 percent of total U.S. emissions. Collins
isn’t just promoting a new climactic model; he wants a new agricultural
paradigm, whereby farmers are paid for “eco-system services” and
beef and dairy livestock shed the stigma of environmental evildoers for a new
identity as a tool in the war on global warming. “Yes, the current model
of industrial livestock farming is detrimental to our environment,” Collins
admits. “But what I’m talking about has nothing to do with the current
model.” Meanwhile, the soil on his fields continues to deepen by a few
inches annually, Collins claims, and his pastures have become so thick in energy-laden
plants that he’s been able to eliminate grain inputs, saving tens of thousands
of dollars a year. “The most powerful tool we have to heal our climate
is locked up in feedlots,” he says. “We just need to open the gate.”
BEN HEWITT

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IS LOCAL ALWAYS BETTER?: From start to finish — from planting seeds
to disposing scraps — the food sector accounts for roughly 25 percent of
an American’s ecological footprint, according to Susan Burns, a managing
director at the Global Footprint Network in Oakland,
Calif. “Choices about what to eat have about the same impact, environmentally,
as choices about how to drive or transport ourselves,” she says. The average
supermarket product travels 1,500 miles to reach the shelf, but Burns concedes
that, from a carbon perspective, it can be confusing being green. There’s
no one accurate carbon footprint calculator for foods, yet. “To give specific
numbers between an apple trucked from Washington
State to Massachusetts
and a papaya shipped to the grocery store,” Burns says, “you’d
have to know everything from the fuel efficiency of the truck to the kind of
fertilizer that was used, to the kind of ship the papaya was shipped on.”
It is the locavore’s dilemma that organic bananas delivered by a fuel-efficient
boat may be responsible for less energy use than highly fertilized, nonorganic
potatoes trucked from a hundred miles away. Even locally grown, organic greenhouse
tomatoes can consume 20 percent more resources than a tomato from a far-off
warm climate, because of all the energy needed to run the greenhouse. Various
organizations like the British grocery chain Tesco
and the Global Footprint Network itself are trying to design accurate calculators
both for carbon outputs and for general ecological impact. But not having them
is no reason not to act. Burns recommends the following steps. First, break
the packaging habit: “It’s not uncommon for food packaging to use
more energy in production than the food it contains,” she says. Next,
make it a goal to eat foods that are at once organic, local, seasonal and low
on the food chain. Local keeps down the transportation miles. Organic eliminates
the high energy costs of pesticides
and fertilizers. Seasonal foods do not need greenhouses or long periods of refrigeration.
And she notes that the food chain matters, carbon-wise: the CO2 impact of a
pound of beef can be 250 times as great as that of a pound of carrots. (Of course,
even the most sustainably raised legume racks up carbon points in an inefficient
refrigerator.) Lastly, some of the most troublesome aspects of the food cycle
occur in disposal. Rotting food is itself an ecological concern, because methane,
a byproduct and a greenhouse gas, has an enormous impact on global warming.
“Compost and advocate for compost,” she says. TESS TAYLOR

SPUDS: The Carbon Trust, an organization formed by the British government
to figure out ways of shrinking the carbon footprint of commercial businesses
and in the public sector, is currently working with a number of companies, including
Cadbury
Schweppes and Coors Brewers. The first to invite the trust’s scrutiny
— and the only company to get a carbon-reduction label on its packaging
so far — was the British potato-chip maker Walkers. Among the recommendations
adopted is sending the waste oil from frying the potatoes to a biodiesel outfit.
Walkers says it has reduced carbon emissions from each package of chips by 14
percent and it uses 45 percent less water in its factories than it did eight
years ago. But sometimes a company bumps up against the nature of its products.
The trust proposed that Walkers use potatoes with less water content: moister
potatoes are heavier to transport and take longer to fry. A potato with lower
water content “seemed like a silver bullet,” says Euan Murray, the
trust’s general manager for carbon footprinting. “It’s turned
out to be a bit trickier than that.” (Drier potatoes do not keep as long.)
Last year Walkers took a different step, buying only British potatoes and saving
a bundle on transport miles. LIA MILLER

Photo

SpudsCredit
Thomas Hannich for The New York Times

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REALLY SLOW FOOD: To make a hay-box cooker, you don’t necessarily
need hay. Nor do you need a box. A guy in Australia
made his using an old plastic cooler and a piece of discarded polystyrene packaging;
others have used tea chests, sacks and baskets. The important thing is to want
to make one in the first place. So why would you want to make one? Advocates
claim that using a hay-box cooker — essentially a carbon-neutral Crock-Pot
— can reduce the amount of energy you use to cook by up to 80 percent.
That makes them popular in places like rural Kenya,
where firewood is hard to come by, but they were also used in Britain
during World War II fuel rationing. The first step is to find a box large enough
to fit a good-size pot. Pad the bottom with about four inches of hay, pillow
stuffing, shredded newspaper or anything else that insulates. Fill your pot
with the ingredients for soup or stew, cover it tightly, bring it to a good
hard boil and let it simmer for 5 or 10 minutes. Then transfer the pot to the
hay box. Pack the sides and top with a thick layer of insulation, and close
the box. Four to eight hours later, your low-carbon meal should be ready for
eating. DASHKA SLATER

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THE HIGH PRICE OF BEEF: Late in February, the governors of Maine,
Rhode
Island, Washington,
Maryland
and other states received letters from Lindsay Rajt of People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, asking them to encourage the citizens
of their states to become vegetarians.
The governors of those states have been fighting for tighter vehicle-emissions
standards as a way to combat climate change. That made them a target for the
folks at PETA, who argue that the climate impact of the car pales in comparison
to that of the cow. A 2006 report by the United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found that livestock production
accounts for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions —
more than all forms of transportation combined. Meat’s supersize impact
comes from fuel- and fertilizer-intensive agricultural methods of growing feed,
all the power needed to run slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants and the
potent greenhouse gases produced by decomposing manure. Pork, lamb and poultry
all have their impacts, but beef is undoubtedly the Hummer of the dinner plate.
Sixty percent of the deforestation in the Amazon
River basin between 2000 and 2005 can be attributed to cattle ranching;
much of the remainder was cleared to raise corn and soy for feed. And cows,
once fed, burp — a lot. Each day, a single cow can burp as much as 130
gallons of methane, a greenhouse gas that traps more than 20 times more heat
per ton than carbon dioxide. Trimming the amount of meat Americans eat would
not only help the planet — a mere 20 percent reduction is the equivalent
of switching from a Camry to a Prius — but would also be likely to reduce
obesity,
cancer
and heart disease. Until recently, it was only animal rights groups like PETA
that were willing to ask Americans to forgo the pleasures of the flesh. That
changed in January, when Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (and a vegetarian), uttered four little words: “Please
eat less meat.” He continued: “This is something that the I.P.C.C.
was afraid to say earlier, but now we have said it.” DASHKA SLATER

PAPER OR PLASTIC?: It sounds like a big step forward in environmental
awareness — Whole
Foods, the eco-friendly grocery chain, will ban conventional plastic shopping
bags in its 270 stores. San
Francisco has banned them in some places; so have Uganda
and Bangladesh.
But paper bags, it turns out, are hardly an ideal replacement. To ensure sturdier
bags, most producers use primarily new paper, which means cutting down more
trees. Then chemicals are used in the production of the bags to give them strength.
According to a study by Franklin Associates, a consulting firm, plastic bags
require significantly less energy than paper over the course of their life cycle,
from manufacturing to transportation. Indeed, because paper bags are seven times
bulkier, on average, than plastic bags, it takes a lot more energy to transport
paper bags to grocery stores. Bulk matters on the other end too: paper bags
take up nine times as much room in landfills, and recycling plastic uses 91
percent less energy than recycling paper. Which isn’t to say that Whole
Foods has it wrong about plastic bags. Most are made from a nonrenewable resource,
petroleum, and contain their own mix of toxic chemicals. They may be more energy-efficient
with recycling, but only about 1 to 3 percent of plastic bags are recycled,
compared with about 10 to 15 percent of paper bags. And millions of the 100
billion bags Americans throw away each year end up as litter, clogging storm
drains and choking
sea animals. A third way may be the only good choice. As part of its ban on
regular plastic bags, for instance, San Francisco is encouraging stores to switch
to cornstarch-derived plastic bags, which break down in about a month and release
no harmful chemicals. And many stores have started to encourage shoppers to
bring reusable cloth bags, or to offer them for sale at a cheap price. CLAY
RISEN

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: EAT. Today's Paper|Subscribe